I apparently have a knack for coming up with nerdy party games. Three Fridays ago, my 6.033 TA encouraged us to practice creating diagrams for our design project proposals by trying to identify UNIX commands or filesystem structures from our partner's drawings. He claims that this "6.033 pictionary" was a result of strong nudging of the course's writing staff. Given that I had been encouraged by some of my friends to learn git earlier that day, naturally, I merged the two ideas and decided that gitionary needed to be created. I told Nelson, who is quite fluent in the ways of git, and he generated the game cards so we could actually play with the idea.

The original premise was simple: draw the appropriate directed acyclic graph corresponding to git commands so that your friends could guess it. However, many people who would likely end up playing the game did not yet know git, myself included, so we thought it would be good to allow drawing non-DAGs, too.

Nelson generated a set of gitionary cards, and we test ran the game with a rotating "artist" and the rest of the room guessing. I can't post pictures and comments about all twenty-six commands drawn that night, so I'll just show you a few (semi-arbitrarily selected) highlights. Many of the most successful were not drawn as directed acyclic graphs, such as git-revert:

git-stash turned out to be difficult when initially drawn in a way that reflected what the command did, and more surprisingly still took about half a minute after the lower left-hand corner of the sheet was sketched:

A somewhat hilarious failure mode of gitionary is that objects which would ordinarily be drawn as a combination of circles and lines inadvertently look like DAGs. This was a problem Jeff had while he was drawing a magnifying glass to represent git-show:

[...] can find more details (and the full photoset from the evening) at Liz’s writeup of the event. Download the gitionary cards, print them double-sided on card stock, and send us pictures of your [...]

[...] and parties: Gitionary. The brainchild of two MIT alums, it’s a party game where you try to illustrate git commands. A set of gitionary cards (PDF) has been posted as well. Personally, I’m still holding out [...]

I don’t think of the word “nerd” having a negative context (if you heard me describing this with tone, which doesn’t translate on the internet, you’d notice this). I think of it as celebrating a certain set of interests. There is a difference between the aspect of my personality that is “smart” and the aspect that occasionally enjoys talking about version control on my own time outside of computing-related projects. One as nitpicky as yourself should think of “nerdy” as “computer-oriented”, but that just doesn’t roll off the tongue the same way :)

I think of nerdy in a good way. You think of nerdy in a good way, and I’m totally with you on source control inside, outside, and on top of work.

However, the rest of America thinks of nerds in a negative way, as happened at the Oscars when James Franco called an Oscar winner in a technical category a “nerd”, and Anne Hathaway laughed. I assure you it was not meant as a compliment. It was the football jock pouring milk on a computer club guy while the cheerleader laughs.

Recently Slashdot (“News for Nerds”) had a story about how America is the only country that disses its techies, (Sorry I can’t find the link.) and David Anderegg wrote a whole book about the problem.

[...] and parties: Gitionary. The brainchild of two MIT alums, it’s a party game where you try to illustrate git commands. A set of gitionary cards (PDF) has been posted as well. Personally, I’m still holding out [...]